Who Gets Thrown Under The Bus In The Next Financial Crisis?

The speculative excesses and political power of Wall Street pose a strategic threat to the Deep State, and as a result a showdown between the Deep State and the surface machinery of governance that has been captured by Wall Street is looming.

The basic idea of the Deep State is that the visible machinery of governance--electoral politics and the Federal Reserve--doesn't set strategic policy, it ratifies and implements decisions made behind closed doors. In Mike Lofgren's definition, the Deep State is "effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process."

In my analysis, the Deep State is the National Security State which enables a vast Imperial structure that incorporates hard and soft power--military, diplomatic, intelligence, finance, commercial, energy, media, higher education--in a system of global domination and influence.

Like any other bureaucracy, the Deep State is prone to group-think, the tendency to join the prevailing "herd" in accepting a dominant paradigm and narrative that identifies key dynamics and sets priorities.

(Anyone seeking a public reflection of the current thinking within the Deep State would do well to read Foreign Affairs, with an emphasis on reading between the lines.)

For the sake of argument, let's assume the leaders of the U.S. Deep State are not complete morons. Granted, that is quite a stretch, given that these are the people who gambled the lives of thousands of American troops and trillions of dollars in treasure on discretionary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But it is also reasonable to assume that the neo-conservatives who naively assumed that residents of Baghdad would not only welcome their foreign liberators with baskets of flowers but would magically reconstruct the social institutions that had been systemically destroyed by Saddam over the previous 30 years--yes, those neo-con nincompoops-- have been quietly put to pasture on their mini-estates in Northern Virginia.

In other words, it is reasonable to assume that the Deep State has accepted that "mistakes were made" and flushed those responsible for the previous decade's disasters.

The Deep State undoubtedly has its own niceties and protocols, but it is by necessity ruthlessly Darwinian: failure is not only always an option, it is inevitable as a systems-level consequence of tightly connected, interactive complex systems; such failures are known as "normal accidents," catastrophes resulting from seemingly small miscalculations and miscues that cascade into systemic crises.

As a result, incompetence cannot be rewarded lest the Deep State itself suffer the consequences.

The Deep State's prime directive is to preserve the Deep State itself and the nation it depends on for its survival. My analysis starts by identifying the vectors of dependency. (To the best of my knowledge, I am the first to use this term in this context.) The Deep State depends on the survival of the U.S. nation-state, but the nation-state does not depend on the Deep State for its survival, despite the certainty within the Deep State that "we are the only thing keeping this thing together."

Strategy is one thing, responding to crisis is another. The surface government (elected officials, regulatory agencies, the Federal Reserve, etc.) responds to crisis in two basic ways: it chooses whatever short-term politically expedient fix reduces the immediate political pain (also known as "kicking the can down the road") and it sacrifices the interests of politically weak groups to protect its cronies and fiefdoms.

This crisis-response triage requires that somebody gets thrown under the bus. In the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed threw savers and the bottom 95% under the bus to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars--what was previously paid in interest--to the banks to rebuild their broken balance sheets. The Fed also provided limitless liquidity to bank trading desks and financiers to skim billions from carry trades, effectively channeling the nation's financial resources to enrich its cronies, the top 1/10th of 1%.

The Deep State must take a longer view, and make strategic triage decisions. All sorts of people, groups and policies are routinely tossed under the bus--foreign leaders, resistance groups, civil liberties, etc.--as the Deep State adjusts to long-term developments and crises with strategic consequences.

Many Deep State decisions and policies are barely noticed, even though they are completely public. For example, the U.S. Deep State recognized that the dissolution of the Soviet Union opened an extremely dangerous door to nuclear weapons falling into non-state hands. So the U.S. spent tens of billions of dollars helping secure the thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons left in limbo after the breakup.

Though the Deep State's institutional bias is to focus on conventional national security issues, it must also monitor potential strategic threats created by issues such as climate change, immigration and Peak Cheap Oil. The financial crisis was apparently an unexpected and unwelcome distraction from the geopolitical Great Game, and the response of the Deep State was muted.while the surface policies of the Federal Reserve and Federal government appear to serve the interests of the financial Elites, I am beginning to discern the possibility of a strategic Deep State response to the next (and inevitable) financial crisis.

This crisis is simple to summarize: the paper claims on wealth so far exceed actual wealth that something's gotta give. These claims include trillions of dollars in shadow-banking bets (derivatives and other leveraged claims all teetering on a tiny base of real collateral) and trillions of dollars in debt-based claims on future income.

Simply put, the vast majority of these claims will have to be zeroed out, i.e. these phantom-claim "assets" will be voided and declared worthless. This leads to the key question: who will the Deep State throw under the bus to preserve itself and the nation-state?

Once again, identifying the vectors of dependency clarifies the strategic priorities. As I pointed out in The Dollar and the Deep State, the pre-eminence of both the Deep State and the U.S. nation-state depend on the U.S. dollar remaining the key reserve currency in the global economy.

The collapse of the U.S. dollar would destroy the foundation of both the Deep State and the U.S. nation-state, hence my conclusion that the Deep State will not enable that collapse.

As for all the financial claims on real wealth that will have to go to zero value, let's identify the operative vector of dependency with a question: which scenario most threatens the Deep State: 50 million hungry Americans taking to the streets shouting, "we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more!" or 10,000 financiers losing a couple trillion dollars in phantom wealth?

In other words, the phantom financier claims of Wall Street now pose a strategic threat to the integrity of the U.S. and its Deep State.

The Deep State needs a functioning U.S. nation-state, and a mass uprising arising from the collapse of the state cannot be suppressed with a few whiffs of grapeshot. The collapse of global pre-eminence and state financing of food stamps and other social welfare programs directly threaten the Deep State.

The collapse of financier fortunes? While that would hurt some Yalie cronies, the Deep State is not Wall Street; it attracts those who prefer power to wealth and strategy to trading. I have no doubt whatsoever that the leadership of the Deep State would have no qualms about throwing bankers and financiers under the bus once they pose a strategic threat to the U.S. dollar and other financial interests vital to the Deep State, for example, keeping 300 million Americans distracted, placated and docile.

It's certainly not lost on the Deep State that a palpable hatred of bankers, financiers and the Federal Reserve is taking root across the land. I know this is outside the mainstream, but I think it is increasingly likely that the financial system's skimmers and swindlers are being recognized as potential strategic threats to the Deep State.

What is essential to the Deep State's survival and supremacy and what is not essential? Are 10,000 obscenely wealthy financiers essential? No. Between saving the U.S. dollar and making whole the $100 trillion in nominal-value bets made by financiers in offshore shadow-banking accounts--there's no contest.

Conventional wisdom has it that Wall Street dominates the state and the Fed. To the degree that these formal surface institutions can be influenced by lobbying, campaign contributions and plum positions, this is true. But these surface institutions only ratify and implement Deep State directives.

I know this sounds "impossible" within conventional narratives, but I am increasingly confident that the financiers' phantom claims on real wealth will be thrown under the bus in the next global financial crisis. Look at it this way: there's essentially nothing left to stripmine from the bottom 80%; most have been reduced to neofeudal debt-serfdom. Since the survival of the nation-state depends on the 80% remaining either passive or productive, the Deep State has a vital strategic interest in both the U.S. dollar and in maintaining the social welfare programs that enable the bottom 80%'s survival.

The Deep State also needs the top 20% to remain productive to maintain U.S. soft and hard power. Transferring trillions of dollars in real wealth to make good the claims of the financier class would require the stripmining of the whatever assets the top 20% still hold. This transfer would directly threaten both the nation-state and the Deep State.

The dominance of Wall Street over the formal, visible machinery of governance has persuaded many that Wall Street is the Deep State. I believe this is a serious misread of the real Deep State. As I noted in The Dollar and the Deep State, to even discern the outlines of the Deep State requires a senior military position or national-security civilian equivalent.

Those writing knowledgeably about Wall Street and finance typically show near-zero knowledge of high-echelon U.S. military and national-security assets, policies and networks, so this blind spot is understandable.

It's widely assumed that Wall Street rules the roost in both the mainstream financial media and in the alternative financial blogosphere. In my view, the speculative excesses and political power of Wall Street pose a strategic threat to the Deep State, and as a result a showdown between the Deep State and the surface machinery of governance that has been captured by Wall Street is looming.

Though everyone who is convinced the U.S. dollar will go to zero is confident that Wall Street will emerge victorious from the next financial crisis, I am convinced of the opposite: the Deep State will do whatever it takes to eliminate strategic threats to the integrity of the Deep State and the nation it depends on for its power and survival. In a financial crisis that threatens the dollar and the Deep State, the phantom claims of Wall Street's financier skimmers, scammers and swindlers will be tossed under the bus with few qualms. The triage might even be performed with a certain relish.

Now think about where gold has been migrating the last 15 years. Then think about how much gold is left here in the U.S. This should tell you everything you need to know about where the TPTB/"Deep State" is physically residing, where their present loyalties lie, and what their viewpoints are regarding the US.

Actually you should think about why they let gold still be traded/bought by the unwashed masses. Its because they have zero fear of it, contrary to the "stacker" manifesto. You can't bring down anything with it, and if they want it, they'll just use their new powers of zero-warrant-searches to find it.

Do you really think they'd let something that could threaten the existing power structure be utilized by the "commoners"? Not unless they have all of their defenses ready, including price manipulation, confiscation and the rest.

There is a Deep Deep State that controls Wall St. AND the Deep State. They have wanted a world government and world central bank for centuries. This will be much better than depending on nation states for loot. There will be nowhere to run to, no country to show the world what it's like to live without THEM, no foreign competition with favored cartels, no worries about nation states that looted too much being taken out by those that looted less. The Deep Deep State could have a neo-feudal prison planet forever.

Destroying America is a key objective on the path to this goal. Perhaps more importantly, the very idea of America must be destroyed. They will ensure that we are mind controlled, tyrannical, hypocritical, hated, unproductive, stupid, and overrun with bludgers and sociopaths. America is to become a cruel mockery of what it once was. Half of Americans will be too dumbed down to even notice, much less care. It is already happening. It will keep getting worse unless America can still muster up 30 million people who remember what freedom was and how to get it back.

As for who to throw under the bus, that's obvious: They intend to eat the last of the productive middle class. "All your account are belong to us. You will sell the fruits of your labor to the FSA at price-controlled prices or be a slave in the camps, making Halliburton-brand soylent green until your time comes". You will get no help from the Deep State. Only traitors will be rewarded. The puppetmasters will finish America off with an EMP when the loot runs out or if the slaves get uppity.

the Deep State is "effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process."

Consent of the governed is manufactured. The MSM is the opiate of the masses, religion having proven unable to continue in that role. The two party American system is an obvious farce, and most Americans get that now. So SOMEONE must be calling the shots, and it sure ain't anyone anybody ever "voted" for. The "public" cannot afford to get any candidate who supports their interests far enough along to actually be able to "vote" for them.

Speaking of Candidate's, some schmuck Senator just said lets freeze all the assets in the Russian banks, etc etc!!!

I love how these motherfuckers think America is the only Country on the planet that has fucking banks!! I'm sure the Russians can do the god damn same thing to USD denominated assets too, not to mention turn off the fucking gas to Europe, and strangle Eastern Europe's economy in 2.5 seconds!!! You think those clowns in the EU are producing anything even close to there wasteful demand??? And then let's talk fucking China, maybe they might slap some travel bans on Americans and freeze some non essential assets, like starting with those iphone factories!!

Oh I know Wall Street delusionaries, America is just too god damn important to EVER do that!!! Ok but remember this, the Russian and Chinese people have a proven track record of surviving and overcoming massive adversity over the last 150 years, massive starvation, wars, struggle the average American Joe and housewife, can't even comprehend!! So if your betting on who can weather hardship longer and better, you better "hopey" the Russians and Chinese are bluffing on this one, or the jig might be up!

If they did, they wouldn't be so patriotic. There's still LOTS of enthusiasm for the Red and Blue Teams, if for no other reason than defeating the other Team. After all: think of [the trrrsss | the children | the Supreme Court picks | "those people" taking all your hard-earned tax money ].

Going by the number of people who are registered and vote red/blue every election, 40%-60% of the population definitely don't get it.

And anyone who does "get it" is promptly replaced by the brainwashed hordes coming out of the government schools. I'm hopeful that the 'Ron Paul' generation and impending death of the school system will break the idiot assembly line.

I think some of the heavy players also get thrown under the bus, most of which have been warned. The sweet thing about trying to control (or, in this case, dole out) chaos is that it is what it is - chaos. But even the mighty taxyer/citizens can't handle all of this.

For the first time I am convinced this will end in war. Right now the EU is handwaving ad Russia is acting like nothing is going on.

Who fire the first shot? Even money it's one of the two ships still loyal to Ukraine, sitting there in the harbor off of the Crimean peninsula.

The money won't be coming from 10,000 financiers. No, they'll drain checking, savings, and cash-holding IRA accounts of any American that has money to steal. It's in Dodd-Frank, for chrissakes, in black and white giving them bail-in authority. In addition to this it will be printing as usual -- the seizures will be window dressing compared to that.

So, anyone with savings gets screwed twice, with the government taking significant value now, and then devaluing what they leave you with.

But you're reading this on ZH, so you already know the escape plan for this event.

Specifically, I think Old People will get thrown under the bus by the Young. Social Security and Medicare won't pay out anymore, or won't pay enough and the people who were told they could rely on it will get screwed.

Exactly. Hasn't the author heard about all the hollow point bullets(1.6 billion, last I read) the Feds are buying. While, at the same time forcing out the last lead smelter via the EPA. If they aren't stopped, there is going to be blood bath, to protect the Debt Plantation Owners.

If only Americans ever figure that out. They think they are players at the table everytime they vote team red, or team blue, or wave a fucking flag on the 4th of July. Hardly players, 2008 proved they all were the suckers. Nothing has changed,

Plus, a take down of the TBTF would have the masses cheering. But, the problems will not be solved. This will not "zero" the bets. The chain of counterparty exposure is global and is far too complex. My guess is some sort of nationalization process that occurs here and in at least London in a similar timeframe. The "can" will get kicked again.

An interesting article Charles, however I disagree with the fact that throwing Wall street under the bus will preserve the state by preventing people from taking to the street. I believe that is inevitable no matter what the state does.

Everyone wants the drunk bombshell falling out of her dress at the bar but when she threatens to get you involved in a barfight for your life, you'll quickly find another place to be that requires your attention.

Very interesting. Reminds me of House of Cards, when Spacey says that he despises those who trade power for money. I agree that the deep state would throw Wall Street under the bus to save the dollar and prevent an uprising, but there is one key fault with this analysis. Will they be successful? There is clear operational risk and who is to say that they will succeed with their plan? What if Big Wall Street and Big Government lackeys turn on them, drunk on their own sense of self-importance? It will be interesting and also terrifying to watch this.

Yeah, and who's to say that "deep state" isn't what we call "wall street".

People like to talk about the top 1%, but - in reality - the top 1% can't exist without the top 10% running things. 3 million people (1%) might be setting the direction, but 30 million people (10%) are happily "driving the bus".

And, (I think), most REAL Mericans would agree that there are winners and losers in life and the losers are just low-life-scum who shouldn't complain about losing because if they do they're nothing but lazy whiners who hate Merica, and the troops.

I have no idea what the security around him is, but if he wants to remain reasonably secure in the event that somebody actually is trying to kill him, he would have to remain a prisoner in his own world.

What happens to the flow of oil? If that gets squeezed, we all lose, rich or poor, government or private.

Refineries are the chokepoint. There is no use for Crude Oil until it is refined. If someone decides to destroy the refineries then there will be no Gas or Diesel for transportation. Destruction of Oil Pipelines will serve to deplete adequate supplies but the destruction of refineries will cause it to stop flowing altogether.

The food will rot in the fields with no way to transport it into the cities. Famine and starvation, along with subsequent civil unrest, will be the result.

Just cutting off foreign oil would be enough to bring the US to its knees and start massive civil unrest. You could leave the refineries in tact. Hell, a (sudden) 25% reduction in oil would likely send us over the brink with the way our economy works now. Prices of everything would skyrocket, people wouldn't be able to afford basic necessities and supply chains would break. Local farmers would either become rich or dead.

If you are talking about a foreign power trying to take out the US, hitting refineries makes sense. If you are talking about a civil war, it doesn't make sense. That's not to say that it couldn't happen, as war and rationality are most certainly not the same thing, but it would be sensible for both sides to assume that, no matter who wins, those refineries would be needed.

Ukrainian issues are nothing to America but the appearance of impotency and/or the intentional failure to support the EU could be the appearance of a dirty swan. Maybe the EU is going under the bus next.

Re: I believe in theological circles this Deep State has another name.

Which is just more theological bullshit to hide the fact that the "Deep State" is the winners of society. And the guy in the mirror has been supporting the winners of the society because he thought we was actually one of the winners.

Surprise! It doen't take the intelligence of Satan to manipulate the average dumbasses. Any highly skilled sociopath can do it.

Please note, the neo-cons are *not* gone; in fact, there are more of them than ever in this Administration/State Dept. This is easy to see once you understand "neo-con" is all about the govenment-military complex, not conservatism.

What about the next financial crisis will make clear anything that wasn't clear after the last one? By early 2009 it was abundantly clear that bankers leveraging the TBTF banks up 40 to 1 to buy their AAA-rated CDOs and MBSes were a threat to the nation state. Yet Dodd-Frank ended up a typical thousands-page, watered-down mess, bank proprietary trading desks continue to this day, and there are fewer and more powerful banks than ever controlling the markets. What is the deep state waiting for? Or maybe things aren't as this post says.

I was wondering how long it would take for the real deep powers in America to recognize that the Wall-Street game is now ruining the national economy, and thus the source of all the real wealth flowing to the very highest elites. We know wall-street can generate profits at an extreme level, but today's street doesn't do that by funding productive enterprise. It is more a skimming scheme than anything else, and our elites have been up to their lips in it. But all they need do is take a cross country drive outside their rich enclaves and see an America that is nothing short of a disaster zone. I see it everywhere. The wealth that funds real economic growth is going to the street's profits, not to enterpirse, It took this long for deep power to figure this out??????????

exactly my point earlier. They clearly have mismanaged things up to this point, who is to say they will be effective in dispatching Wall St. They are Dr. Frankenstein and have lost control of their monster imo

Well after reading this I do not believe that there is much hope for the Deep State retaining control.

The article states, and this is the major weakness as these are assumptions...

For the sake of argument, let's assume the leaders of the U.S. Deep State are not complete morons. Granted, that is quite a stretch, given that these are the people who gambled the lives of thousands of American troops and trillions of dollars in treasure on discretionary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But it is also reasonable to assume that the neo-conservatives who naively assumed that residents of Baghdad would not only welcome their foreign liberators with baskets of flowers but would magically reconstruct the social institutions that had been systemically destroyed by Saddam over the previous 30 years--yes, those neo-con nincompoops-- have been quietly put to pasture on their mini-estates in Northern Virginia.

I disagree that these assumptions are reasonable. In fact with the continuation of destructive policies over the past FIVE YEARS it has been demonstrated that the morons are still in charge of the Deep State.

If the Military and Intelligence communities have lost control over their low level operatives (Snowden and Manning) leaking information then how do they expect to control an entire World Economy? (I am not writing that what Snowden or Manning did was evil. To the contrary it was admiriable and honorable.)

Furthermore they seem to have lost direction. The neocons attempted to start a war in Syria...and succeeded by proxy...and are seeking to attack Iran. They are still in power. They have not "...been put out to pasture..." in Northern Virginia."

The article makes some poor assumptions as premises for the argument which invalidates the conclusions.

I agree with Tall Tom's criticism of some of CHS's assumptions regarding the neocons. They continue to have considerable power for two reasons: Obama's willingness, until now, to leave them in place in his attempt to maintain a "big tent" for policy and protect himself from political sniping. He was not aware of the relentless drive of the neocons to bend policy to favor their sponsors when he made his initial appointments. He is apparently still not willing to fire Nuland, notwithstanding her ineptitude. The second reason is the ability of the neocons to meld themselves into the fabric of the long-standing tendency of the US toward imperialism. Even though the US was born in rebellion from empire, from its earliest days it was not free from the temptations of international power projection. The latter being an accepted phrase in pentagon discourse currently. The United Nations Charter and other tenets of international law forbid the interference in the internal affairs of sovereign, independent states. But the CIA and past embodiments of the imperial urge pay absolutely no attention and do the opposite - to the destruction of the true long-term interests of the United States.

In Mike Lofgren's definition, the Deep State is "effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process."

In my analysis, the Deep State is the National Security State which enables a vast Imperial structure that incorporates hard and soft power--military, diplomatic, intelligence, finance, commercial, energy, media, higher education--in a system of global domination and influence.

I've concluded that it isn't productive to try and discern all of the intricate relationships and fiefdoms that comprise the state. Deep State? You could define that in many ways. You can draw lines around groups of people all you want but it doesn't really help matters. In the end there are voluntary and involuntary relationships. Try your best to limit your exposure to the involuntary ones. Even if you could identify all of the players and relationships, would you be better off? I don't think so. We get new masters frequently and nothing changes because people don't change their minds.

There is validity to the thesis. But it's more simply that the taxpayer is broke and wall st has some cash, so they might grab it. The people will obviously support that. It's either the unborn paying for it via inflation or wall st. I'll bet on the unborn, but the thesis isn't bad.

I can see some logic in the article however do not see how the nation can get around the 17+ trillion current debt and 200 trillion in unfunded liabilities. We would have to see a major deflation in the cost of living to reduce the 200 trillion so that the masses could live a reasonable existence by the reduced costs (as a result of deflation)medicare, medicade, Social Security, etc.

If you like the term "Deep State", you can keep the term "Deep State".

But so far as the UK is concened, what is really being described is the army of unelected members of The Establishment.

These nameless, faceless people are collectivists of either the communist or fascist variety. They all went to the right schools, all went to the right universaties, all met the right people and all made the right contacts to get into the right careers in the Foreign Office, Treasury, Bank of England, Home office and other important Ministries of State where power resides. For them, having to be democratically elected and accountable is unacceptable. Democracy is only for the political types who enjoy being in the spotlight.

Nevertheless, these people see elected politicos come and go with indecent haste. They create multiple versions of policy for the elected politicos to choose from. Once a policy is adopted, the policos become the public face of it, even though he had little to do with its formulation.

Ok, I agree. There are two breeds of psychopaths: those who love power and those who love money. They are not the same.

Those who love power are in government. The question is are they also in the Fed.

If the Fed is made up of people who love money then the scenario above may not happen. But if they are lovers of power (if you have power you can take other people's money) then the above scenario will play out.

Agree that throwing financiers under the bus makes sense versus revolution. You are vague on the HOW, and you suggest that the dollar will remain sound.

I see it differently. The issue is who is the DEEP STATE and what do they want. I think there is a titanic struggle between the military and the financiers. The military has won. The plan is hyperinflation, disclosure of no gold in Fort Knox. Rubin goes to jail or the guillotine. We have a new dollar based on the gold standard. All bond holders get fucked. The Chinese get fucked. We reboot the system. Most people are broke anyway so they do not feel the pain of all paper assets disolving. Of course, the military and politicians use the collapse as a way to gain power and control. The corruption does not necessarily end, but the rich are no longer rich. Probably a special tax on gold owners and gold stocks. This scenario at least keeps people working and fed. It possibly keeps the Government bureaucrats alive because they have the favors to give out. The anger associated with the collapse gets associated with the FED and the rich who led us here. You would not want to be Greenspan, Buffet or Bernanke.

The new world actually does not look too bad because by flushing the financial system the politicians will also get flushed. There will be enough pain to re boot government too. Finance reform, term limits, etc.

Perhaps I am too optimistic, but it is not impossible. It could also be very messy.

The MIC would no doubt love to see us get into a shooting war in the Crimea. That is how we got to where we are today.

One thing that works in our favor is that Ron Paul got more military donations than any other canidadate. Some people in the military "get it, and have honor". Not all, but some. If these people prevail we will be in good shape. If the careerists prevail may God help us.

Sounds like wishful thinking to me. WTSHTF if you are in the breeze you're gonna get some on you and the "deep state" will not care who is downwind. What is the real difference between a carefully managed devaluation of the dollar and a collapse of the dollar? If the devaluation is carefully managed and does not ever reach a panic stage as Wall Street and the state (deep and shallow) desire, there is time for proper positioning, the rich continue to get richer, and no paradigm shift occurs. The real losses are all shared pro-rata by the productive class and the non-productive classes barely notice the change. What losses the 1% incur are also shared pro-rata.

If the dollar collapses things will get ugly. You are right about the paper claims against real assets being impossible to satisfy at current pricing, but Wall Street, the "deep state," and the political class all know this. Anyone who gives it the slightest bit of thought knows this. You don't accumulate that amount of USDs to go out and buy stuff — you do it to control people.

Q: who will the Deep State throw under the bus to preserve itself and the nation-state?

A: public sector unions & retirees. all these teachers, cops, firemen, bus drivers, etc. who think they have a retirement/savings are kidding themselves - the state(s) are going to default and those deals/pensions/promises are going to evaporate... those folks will get nothing.

If you live within 30 miles of any town with a population greater than 100k you are already screwed. Buy a small house and farm plot in the midwest, start making appearences at the lions club meetings, etc. Donate, be a pal to all, so you can live there, cuz when it does go, they will blow the bridges and the cities will become zombie central and they will eat you. Patagonia looks pretty good to me right now though.

This is a very perceptive narrative that contains some very broad speculation. In such speculation, very often assumptions are made about the planning abilities and motivations of the powerful. It is assumed that the true power holders have a clear agenda that most members adhere to. In real life this is usually not the case. The author assumes that high level pentagon people have the necessary vision to ensure the survival of both the deep state and the visible government. This is doubtful. Most high level pentagon people are quite similar to the Wall Street skimmers in that their purely personal ambitions are the prime movers in their overall activity. They have, or plan to have, immense wealth and the political power it provides. This is not a formula for responsible citizenship in a constittional democracy. What is more, as some commentators have pointed out, the Wall Street skimmers and the deep state operatives are very often the same people.